A display for supporting ownership of virtual arms

Abstract

To enable convincing first-person interactions involving object manipulation, virtual reality systems need to represent the user's body in the virtual environment. Virtual body parts, particularly the arms and hands, must appear in the correct perceived spatial positions in a first-person view so that users can “take ownership” of them. One current method to achieve this goal is head-mounted displays, but they have cost and motion sickness problems. Other methods such as table-top projections have problems with image occlusion by the user'sown limbs. In this paper we describe a low-cost alternativeusing a mirrored horizontal display which places virtual arms in the correct position relative to the user on a table top. We hypothesized that, compared to a normal monitor, our display provides improved subjective ownership of virtual limbs while maintaining equivalent ease of use. Questionnaires on healthy subjects showed that they found it easier to induce selfownership of virtual arms using our display. We also compared a virtual rubber hand illusion using our display with a real rubber hand illusion and found comparable ownership results. We conclude that our display can support improved ownership of virtual arms compared to a normal vertical display.

To enable convincing first-person interactions involving object manipulation, virtual reality systems need to represent the user's body in the virtual environment. Virtual body parts, particularly the arms and hands, must appear in the correct perceived spatial positions in a first-person view so that users can “take ownership” of them. One current method to achieve this goal is head-mounted displays, but they have cost and motion sickness problems. Other methods such as table-top projections have problems with image occlusion by the user'sown limbs. In this paper we describe a low-cost alternativeusing a mirrored horizontal display which places virtual arms in the correct position relative to the user on a table top. We hypothesized that, compared to a normal monitor, our display provides improved subjective ownership of virtual limbs while maintaining equivalent ease of use. Questionnaires on healthy subjects showed that they found it easier to induce selfownership of virtual arms using our display. We also compared a virtual rubber hand illusion using our display with a real rubber hand illusion and found comparable ownership results. We conclude that our display can support improved ownership of virtual arms compared to a normal vertical display.

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